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For many people, property ownership is principally a legal matter,
to be filed by lawyers in patent offices and decided by judges in
courts. However, there are ethical considerations that promote our
understanding of property ownership as applied to instances in agricultural
biotechnology. For example, is it ethically justifiable to claim
ownership to a DNA insertion technique, or to a newly discovered
gene sequence, or to a novel transgenic plant species? Thompson
(1997) shares his perspective on this issue with an ethical discussion
of what constitutes property.
Thompson raises two ethical questions that are the cornerstone
of the issue:
- What counts? This is a definitional perspective that identifies
what sorts of entities can and cannot be owned.
- Who owns it? Thompson defines this as a distributional question
that addresses how assignments of ownership are made.
Thompson submits that these questions are deeply intertwined and
not always separable; however, the debate in agricultural biotechnology
has focused mainly on the first question above because the very
nature of transgenic organisms and gene sequences appears to challenge
this question.
Thompson notes two broad philosophical approaches that define property:
ontological definitions and property viewed as a social construction.
The ontological approach defines property in terms of key traits
or characteristics of goods. Thompson provides two schools of thought
here: natural law and labor theory. Within natural law theory, goods
that are naturally rival, excludable, and alienable are defensible
as property. From labor theory, Thompson suggests that a person's
productive work is the basis for a property claim. Individuals are
entitled to claim what they make or create as their own. While discovery
in and of itself does not establish property within this line of
reasoning, the use of a discovery to some further purpose does.
 In
contrast to ontological definitions, Thompson writes that property
might also be defined as a social construction. Here, ownership
is validated in terms of its ability to secure other ethical goals.
For example, libertarian theory supports property rights to the
extent that ownership promotes liberties such as freedom of action,
expression, and exchange. In tandem to libertarian theory, a utilitarian
approach to property rights submits that ownership is justified
when said ownership facilitates the creation of valued goods in
society. Thus, utilitarian philosophy suggests that property rights
are ethically justifiable when they increase net social value and
that ownership maximizes social welfare and creates incentives for
innovation.
Thompson offers that within the context of agricultural biotechnology
the utilitarian argument to property ownership has been applied
the most frequently; although from a purely ethical standpoint,
the labor criteria possibly establishes the strongest and most plausible
claim to property rights in biotechnology. Thompson cautions that
while ontological definitions and social construction views to property
ownership provide ethical insight, these fundamental concepts are
open to interpretation. Thus, they allow for meaningful philosophical
debate regarding intellectual property rights in agricultural biotechnology;
however, they do not necessarily provide us with definitive answers.
Reference:
Thompson, P. B. (1997). Food Biotechnology in Ethical Perspective.
London: Blackie Academic & Professional.
Click here to consider GM technology from an epistemological perspective...
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